By Chuck Palahniuk, Doubleday, 2005
Haunted
By Chuck Palahniuk, Doubleday, 2005
Chuck Palahniuk and/or his publisher wants his latest novel to be considered in some distinguished company. The jacket copy - and, consequently, a number of critics’ reviews - compares the book to Bocaccio’s The Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales; the common ground, supposedly, that links those staples of Western literature to Palahniuk’s book is that all three use storytelling as their framework, gathering together tales told by a number of characters into one more or less coherent work. Palahniuk puts his own inimitable style (actually, Palahniuk’s style is eminently imitable, but I’m sure he and his publisher would like to think it’s not) to work on the genre, coming up with a book that is, again in the words of the jacket copy, “The Real World meets Alive.”
What Haunted really is, not letting the publisher put words in our mouths for a moment, is an ensemble horror story, ostensibly driven by a powerful evil that brings together a bushel of characters and then toys with them. It’s like an especially cheesy Vincent Price movie, or, if one wishes to be excessively generous, like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s a trifling little exercise in easy chills, and at times it is genuinely creepy. Ultimately, though, Palahniuk’s wearisome sociopathic sensibilities take all the fun out of it and leave behind a typically silly novel-gone-wrong.
The premise is this: a group of writers (the character count stands somewhere around 20, but it’s hard to keep track) respond to an ad that encourages them to leave their lives behind for three months, live in a writer’s retreat and write great stuff. They each slip out of their homes before dawn, telling no one they’re leaving and taking only one bag each, to board a mysterious bus that whisks them away to the sinister retreat. Once they’re locked away in a terrifying building, things go horribly wrong, and the retreat turns into an unimaginable nightmare.
The book is structured around stories written by each of the characters, each of them prefaced by a poem about that particular character. The characters have given each other nicknames (e.g, Miss America, the Earl of Slander, Reverend Godless, Comrade Snarky) by which they are exclusively identified (because, I guess, actual names smack of realism, and realism is so not postmodern). Between the stories, interludes of plot about the retreat-from-hell itself attempt to make the whole thing a novel rather than a short story collection.
If you’re familiar with Palahniuk (and if you’re not, you should be before you pick up one of his books), you know that the individual stories as well as the broader plot arc, like all of Palahniuk’s work, revolve around subject matter that is intentionally as offensive as possible. Palahniuk has perfected the use of scatology, sadomasochism, graphic violence and sexual deviancy masquerading as satire, and he doesn’t leave any of it out here. The idea, I think, is to make the reader laugh uncomfortably, thereby distracting him from the fact that not much of importance is being said.
The buzz around the book is little more than circus sideshow hype, claiming that the stories are so gross that they’ve made some readers pass out, all the while offering few specific details (probably largely due to the editorial standards of the publications in which features about the book appear). In the interest of avoiding such coy vagueness, I’ll be more specific: the first story, written by a character called Saint Gut-Free, meticulously and gleefully describes inventive methods of self-gratification, the physical properties of the large intestine and the horrible things that can happen when those two topics intersect. After that first story, Palahniuk hits his stride, conjuring up visions of excrement, murder, mayhem and cannibalism. The gore is so thick that one hardly notices the absence of true plot or characters with real names.
Beyond the ickiness, Palahniuk doesn’t offer a lot. Some of the stories are irresistibly clever - such as the one about the seedier side of reflexology - but on balance the satire is too pat and obvious. Potshots at reality TV and local news morning shows? One would hope that a smart author could do better than that. The characters, too, are simple stereotypes, from Miss America to Comrade Snarky, and the bad poems that introduce each of them are merely character notes with poem-like line breaks.
If Haunted has anything to say, it’s in the book’s multitude of not-so-veiled comments about writers and the writing life, and the bite of that commentary is admittedly kind of fun. But more than anything, Haunted shows a writer far too dependent on gross-out sensationalism and gratuitous formal tradition-busting. Take away the blood and guts and the cute character names, and you’re left with something that even Vincent Price would have been embarrassed to star in; leave in the blood and guts, and all you’ve got is something that only a 14-year-old (or a 14-year-old-at-heart) could love.
Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.